News / AI & Governance
AI Oversight Isn't a Tech Project. It's a Board Operating Model.
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Dec 20, 2025
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Darius Chen
If your board's AI conversation lives inside the CIO report, you've already lost the plot.
Most boards have started the AI conversation in the wrong place: tooling. Policies proliferate. Model inventories appear. A committee gets a quarterly update.
Then the hard questions show up late - after an incident, a regulator letter, or an unexpected customer outcome. That is not oversight. That is post-mortem governance.
The myth: AI can be managed as an IT control
Treating AI as "something the CIO manages" is attractive because it feels tidy. But AI does not sit neatly inside a system boundary. It sits inside decisions: pricing, credit, hiring, claims, onboarding, approvals, and customer support. When AI is embedded in a business decision, risk is owned by the executive accountable for that decision - not by the team that deployed the model.
AI is leverage. Leverage without governance is volatility.
The reality: AI reshapes decision rights
The governance question is not "Do we have an AI policy?" It is "Who can approve what, and on what evidence?" Boards should assume AI will change how decisions are made, delegated, and audited across the enterprise. That shifts accountability maps, not just risk registers. If decision rights are unclear, incidents become political: everyone had input, no one had ownership.
The fix: define control points, not principles
Principles are cheap. Control points force discipline. Control points are moments where the organisation must stop, produce evidence, and obtain approval before moving forward. They make oversight real.
Board-level control points
1) Use-case gating: which decisions are allowed to be model-assisted or automated.
2) Evidence standards: what must be proven (accuracy, bias, robustness, security) before launch.
3) Change control: what triggers re-approval (data shifts, model swaps, new geographies).
4) Accountability: which executive owns outcomes and remediation.
5) Escalation: what incidents reach the board, and within what timeframe.
A practical board posture
Ask management to show you the decision map, not the tool stack. If the map is incomplete, that is the insight: AI is already in the business, but governance has not caught up.